G 29-40
- Thread starter bjarne
- Start date
waffenmeister
Senior Member
Photo evidence of a "Franken Rifle".
The rifle has been converted to a competition rifle. Denmark had stockpiles of german rifles after the war. The Danish shooting sport associations have since the mid 1800's always been using the same rifles as the Danish military, so that when war came, the civilian men would already be trained riflemen. This changes after WW2, when the Danish Army introduced the M1 Garand as the standard rifle. M1 Garands were not available to civilians and in any case to expensive for most folks. They also introduced the Home Guard at the same time. So what the sport associations did was to take german rifles (very cheap) and fit them with M1 type sights - at the same time they rebarreled the rifles to caliber 6,5x55. The barrels were supplied by the Danish riflemaker "Otterup" (Schultz & Larsen) which are well known to produce excellent rifles. You can also se the Otterup stamp at the barrel of the rifle in this thread. The rifle is most likely an excellent shooter and great fun - they can be found for reasonable prices in Denmark (around $100). It is maybe not an original rifle anymore, but it still has some history to it and is very nice for competition shooting at the 200/300 meter range.
mauser99
Senior Member
Thanks for the history an explanation of the rifle. These conversions are not un-common and I have seen other countries do the same thing with their mausers. Spain comes to mind with there conversion of the m93 I think to replicate the CETME semi auto rifle. These rifles were worth next to nothing basically for many years and it was much cheaper to upfit these than make an actual trainer.
